Monthly Archives: July 2012

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At the risk of meeting the coal industry’s standard of child porn, here is a family that was begging on the street by my office. There are an estimated 26 million homeless in India, of which 3 million are literally on the street. The rest have some sort of roof over their heads, barely.

Gangs that kidnap, buy, and maim children are not the stuff of Slumdog Millionaire storytelling, so the politics of giving to beggars is agonizing. Anyone who has anything dismissive to say about liberal guilt can bite me. I’m guilty and proud. That is to say, I’m not guilty about feeling a duty to use the resources that our unequal world has bestowed upon me in a responsible way.

So: beggars. On the one hand, the thought that I would indirectly reward someone for successfully stealing a child makes me sick. On the other, there is a hungry human being standing in front of me. To not give for the greater good is to make their hunger a tool of my social policy.

The “right” answer is a) the most responsible thing to do is to give to organizations, and b) there are no right answers.

They seemed a lot better-natured about their chores than I was when it was my turn to mow the lawn.

I think some of it probably crossed the line into child labor, which is illegal.

There are an estimated 200,000 kids in Bangalore working anyway. The government has a program to “rescue” working kids and put them in school. The programs are residential, because otherwise the kids don’t make it to class much.

. . . but hiring private security guards to patrol the streets to prevent illegal construction is kind of bourgeoise-guerrilla in its own way.

The construction in question is a “signal-free corridor” (in American English, “big-ass highway”), which the Bangalore Development Authority is trying to build through Koramangala. Here’s the deal: Bangalore was not build for cars and Lo, the Lord hath sent a plague of Tatas and Suzukis raining down on the People of Karnataka. Private vehicle registrations has nearly tripled in the last decade. The BDA’s response has been straight-no-chaser Urban Renewal: highways, overpasses, underpasses, and road-widening. It’s hugely controversial, and usually the BDA wins. But then the irresistible force of the BDA ran into the immovable object of the Koramangalan Pissed-Off Neighbors.

Koramangala is the Bangalore equivalent of, say, West Hollywood. The Koramangalans moved to their hood for a certain je ne sais quoi. Je really don’t sais quoi, since it looks a lot like the rest of Bangalore in terms of urban form, but with more Taco Bell and KFC. In any case, it’s not what most Americans would picture as a suburb, where highways are not out of place. In Koramangala, the main roads are 4- to 6-lane arterials with stores and stoplights, hustle and bustle. Did I mention the KFC?

The Koramangalans answered the signal-free corridor with a lawsuit challenging the procedure by which the project was approved. They got a restraining order, which the BDA proceeded to ignore. Enter security guards. Next: Occupy Koramangala?

The fashionable narrative about the whole hullabaloo is that the opponents of signal-free corridors are enemies of Progress, selfishly standing in the way everyone else’s automobile dreams. But they are raising important arguments in favor of multi mobility: that if you widen the roads enough for everyone to drive, there won’t be many buildings left standing for them to want to drive to.

This two-year-old lives with his family on the ground floor of an under-construction building around the corner from my apartment, between the chandelier shop and the mosque. Construction workers usually live in the projects they are building; of the many hazards of growing up in a construction zone is occasional building collapse. Last fall, three children (13, 7, and 11 months) survived the collapse of an under-construction building that killed two workers only because they were playing next to a pile of cement bags that caught the slabs of the floors above.

Bangalore generates about 1,700 tons of solid waste a day. Household waste is typically piled on the street either loose or in used plastic shopping bags. Trash pickers go through it by hand, pulling out plastic bottles, cardboard, and other reusables or recyclables. Everything left behind is collected each morning by street sweepers with brooms. They load it into pushcarts, cycle-carts, and souped-up rickshaw contraptions, and wheel it to transfer points. Ultimately, lorries haul it to the landfill.

Here, a dog rests on a nearly full sweeper cart, presumably dreaming the sweetest of doggie dreams.

I’ve been taking photos out the side of my auto-rickshaw on the way to work. I love it because there’s nowhere else you can hang out of a moving vehicle a foot off the ground while going 30 mph, and where everyone is driving about a foot away from each other and usually in some degree of au plein aire. It’s a set of conditions that may be maddening for getting from point A to point B, but awesome for photography.

Bangalore streets are aggressive, competitive, polluted, and exhausting for everyone involved. Full of people who, like commuters everywhere, see each other as traffic. At the same time, there’s an intimacy to it that is at the essence of the urban — that “being together of strangers”-ness (to quote Iris Young) that gives cities their heartbeat.

A new apartment building is going up on my street, which means that entire families are sifting sand, mixing cement, and carrying loads of bricks on their heads. This boy, who is peering out of the fencing around the property, is probably not old enough to work yet, but I’ve seen kids maybe a year older than him caring for younger siblings as their moms work.